Eating the Butterfly Weed!I looked yesterday at the seed pods of the butterfly weed and found them to be full of the nymphs of the milkweed bug. The Butterfly Weed is a milkweed and the insects were loving the poisonous sap! The monarch butterfly larvae and the milkweed bugs both eat this plant.
The milkweed bug goes through incomplete metamorphosis - starting from an egg then transforms to the nymph stage and finally to an adult. (This is different from the butterflies that have complete metamorphosisn - egg-larvae-cocoon-adult) You can see the wing pads developing in the photo below.
The adult is a striking insect. Milkweed bugs have few predators because they concentrate in their bodies bad tasting compounds found in the sap of milkweed plants. The bugs use the bright coloration to advertise their bad taste. Inexperienced birds that taste their first milkweed bug are unlikely to try to eat another orange and black insect! Some insects that do not taste bad use similar color patterns to fool birds. These are known as mimics.
posted by Jim Meads @ 2:00 AM
2 Comments:
I've had these orange and black bugs on my milkweed plants this summer and wasn't sure just what they were. Now after some research I see that they just eat these kind of plants along with the monarch butterflies. There are thousands of these bugs in all stages and I'm wondering where are the butterfly eggs or do the bugs eat those too?? Nasty little buggers!
Thank you for an informative description of the orange and black bugs in my garden. Appreciate your direct facts.
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